


heatstroke

by sulfuric



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29916105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulfuric/pseuds/sulfuric
Summary: Bill Denbrough wears his guilt like a jacket.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough & Georgie Denbrough
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	heatstroke

**Author's Note:**

> rewatched both it and it ch2 today and quietly went insane until this came out of me. bill denbrough lives inside my mind and he is beating his fists against the walls of my skull at all times!

Bill Denbrough wears his guilt like a jacket. 

It’s an eternal summer, 35°C, and he is pulling its fleece stubbornly around his shoulders like a bet that he will never win. The heatstroke is chronic at this point, but he refuses to remove himself from this second skin. His chest reads, ‘I killed my baby brother and all I got was this stupid t-shirt and a saviour complex’ which obviously isn’t something he can let be seen—let _himself_ be seen, the real monster that he is—so he stays zipped right up to his chin, sleeves balled over his fists. 

They do not soften the blow of the beating on his skull. 

He doesn’t mind it, in all honesty. After— _after,_ everything now is an after that the best part of his _before_ does not get to see—he doesn’t really have the energy to focus on clothes. Letting skin and fabric go stale as they mold together isn’t too big of a deal when there’s no one else at the dinner table waiting to scold you for the smell, anyway. Right from the start he’s decided on the fact that he deserves it, sweating through to soak his sheets in grief each night. Maybe if he’s lucky, the damp on his skin will drown him someday.

Sometimes his friends will come up to him and they’ll ask, “Bill, how come you’re still in that old thing? It’s been two years, you should probably change. And it’s so hot out!” It’s been two years but he can still see the pinkish divots sitting on Stan’s hairline like a halo, death sentence twenty-five years too soon. It’s been two years but every day he watches Eddie pull out a pack of travel size sanitizing wipes and wipe down his desk and chair in homeroom. It’s been two years and he doesn’t remember what his mom’s special knock on his door at bedtime ever sounded like, so he throws his hands in his pockets, ignores the heat, and calls it penance. 

The thing about penance, though, is that it’s usually followed by absolution. And Bill’s no catholic, but he’s pretty sure murder is one of the ones that doesn’t get forgiven.

So it’s summer, so it’s suicide—so on and so forth, etc. We all know how that one goes. 

Eventually he grows up and the sleeves get a little shorter. He leaves his hometown and the explanation on his chest is no longer in a language he can decipher (written by childish hands, anyway, isn’t it better he leaves it behind?) but the jacket stays on. He doesn’t quite remember why he can’t take it off, but something deep in his gut—just to the left of the hole where he thinks his childhood might have been, if he even had one—tells him not to question it. So he doesn’t, and the grief sinks so deep into his bones that he forgets that’s what it was called in the first place. Now it’s just a fact, something he carries on his shoulders with a fraying resolve.

Winters are uneasy, chill blowing through him not with discomfort but a relief that he can only categorize as _wrong._ Undeserved, maybe? He doesn’t know what it was that he did, but he knows it’s bad. He tells people he runs cold and piles on the gloves and the hat and the scarf and tells himself he doesn’t take satisfaction in the way his throat restricts when he pulls it tight around his neck. He doesn’t understand why he feels a tug on the fabric when he tells people he’s an only child, or when he sees the kid that lives on the same floor as him giggling out of the elevator in a yellow rain slicker and a gap-toothed smile. He doesn’t understand and he doesn’t try to, comfortable with the weight and the burning skin and the constant dizzy nausea he’s grown so accustomed to.

It’s a good jacket. It fits him fine enough. He runs cold, so he needs it. He needs it. He isn’t him, without it—right? He’s can’t take it off. If he takes it off— 

He does not take it off. 

But then he hears a name that’s been hiding in the stitches for twenty-seven years and it all comes rushing back like a tidal wave he was just too big to be washed away by, no matter how much he tried to make it him instead. 

He makes a scene in a Chinese restaurant and his friends say, “Bill, are you really still wearing that fucking jacket? It’s summer.” But _it’s summer_ is what they said before he dragged them into the sewers looking for the torn-up remains of a riptide, and _it’s summer_ is what they said before he damned them to a life of forgetting only the best and remembering only the worst. And he’s not looking at a halo of scars when they say it because Stan is dead, so Bill is not taking off his fucking jacket. 

The fabric is worn enough to stretch over his knees when he collapses to the sticky floor of a flickering carnival maze, and it is warm enough that he does not feel the bite of the wind as he pedals in the night, yawning doorway of Neibolt like the mouth of absolution. 

This is a fever he has long since learned to live with—and long since accepted he will die with, twenty-seven years too late for his permanently flushed taste—but maybe love sits alongside the burning; a symptom of it, too. Maybe it was sewn in all along, albeit distorted and inaccessible between the fibres, and maybe right now it’s shed itself into a decrepit yard full of broken glass, musing on bad jokes long since lost in the heatwave of that first unholy summer.

And after— _after_ after, something he never would have thought could exist—he sits inside his office and watches the leaves fall down in brilliant orange, and he realizes this is a season he can let himself tolerate. There is a letter still sitting on his desk and there are tears still sitting on his face and he thinks that it might be okay for him to roll up his sleeves. There is no cure for the damage that’s already been done, no prescription for the sibling sized heat-rash in the crease of his elbows—but there is the cool press of the cloth on his forehead called _friendship,_ and this time it doesn’t dry up when he leaves the state. And maybe he’s not going to be able to take the jacket off anytime soon, or perhaps even ever. But when he lets the zipper fall open and the hood comes off and he lets his shoulders slip into the world again, he knows that his friends will be there to read the words on his chest and tell him it’s bullshit.

In the end, the fever breaks. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> kudos & comments deeply treasured. find me on [tumblr](https://losersclub3000.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/losersclub3000)!


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